Empowering Midlife Women: Break Free from Emotional Eating and Embrace Food Freedom Together

Are you tired of the endless cycle of dieting and emotional eating that leaves you feeling defeated and confused? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories as she sits down with Leah Pinelli, a passionate life coach dedicated to helping professional women break free from the shackles of emotional overeating and discover true food freedom. Leah’s journey began at just nine years old, when she first became aware of her weight and started down a path of dieting that would lead to years of struggle with disordered eating. But everything changed for Leah at 36 when she became a mother, sparking a transformative journey towards clarity and self-acceptance.

Throughout their heartfelt conversation, Leah emphasizes the importance of understanding your body’s hunger cues and learning to stop eating when you’re satisfied. This episode dives deep into the societal pressures surrounding food, the confusion created by diet culture, and the necessity of self-compassion and curiosity in developing a healthy relationship with food. Leah introduces her innovative program, “90 Days to Food Freedom,” which focuses on brain-based solutions to tackle the underlying issues of emotional eating. Listeners will gain valuable insights into how to reclaim their relationship with food and make peace with their bodies.

Heather and Leah explore the biochemical responses to processed foods and the significance of trusting one’s body to guide healthy eating habits. They discuss nutrition advice that empowers women to embrace their midlife changes with confidence, shedding light on weight loss myths and the impact of food beliefs on our choices. The conversation touches on the importance of mindful eating practices, sustainable eating, and how family food traditions shape our personal food journeys.

With Leah’s expertise, you’ll learn how to navigate the complexities of emotional eating and develop a joyful eating experience that aligns with your values. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to break free from the cycle of dieting and embrace a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. Join us as we empower women to nourish their bodies and cultivate a positive body image, especially during midlife transitions. Tune in for a transformative discussion that could change your relationship with food forever!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. Today I am with Leah Pinelli. Leah is a life coach and a woman on a mission to help smart, busy professional women free up the mental real estate they’re currently wasting county calories and carbs and instead use that energy to create the lives they crave unapologetically. Having lost 30 pounds using the same method herself. Leah’s helped countless women stop emotional overeating and simplify weight loss from the inside out. Her 90 Days to Food Freedom program teaches what every other weight loss program doesn’t, which is brain-based solutions to solve the real problems and end self-sabotage for good. So welcome, Leah, to the podcast. I’m so happy to have you here today. And I think as you might know, I love to share Real Food Stories, that’s the title of my podcast, and just talk to real women with genuine stories about food struggles, because I know that it helps women feel less alone. So I know you have a personal story around food and weight loss. So why don’t we just jump in and start with that, and then we’ll talk about what you do and what you’ve learned from your story.

Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Heather, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be on the show today. Yeah, a little bit about my personal story. I’ll keep it brief. But basically, I had struggled with food and weight since I was nine. And I say nine because nine years old was when I really became aware that it was a problem, quote unquote. I had always been teased for being, you know, on the heavier side. But kids tease, you know, we all tease about something. So it didn’t really, you know, seem like it was a thing until my mom, I think at the, at the urging of my pediatrician had this very sensitive. I mean, she was very, very aware of, you know, being really careful with this discussion, but she came to me and she said, you know, I think we, she’s, we, I think we need to go on a diet. And, um, I remember thinking, oh, wow, like I am different then because my sister, who’s three and a half years older than me, she, she didn’t eat a diet and my brother didn’t eat a diet and my dad didn’t eat a diet, but me and my mom did, you know? And so it became, I became very aware of like, oh, there’s something wrong. And that was when I first started dieting, of course. And then you name it, I tried it. So every diet in the book, I definitely had a bout of some disordered eating and in college. I was going UC Berkeley and there’s a lot of pressure that I was putting on myself, to be fair, but that really resulted in some, you know, troubling behaviors with food. And then of course I dieted all into my twenties and even thirties. And it wasn’t until I had my son at the age of 36 that I was like, I don’t have time for this. Like forget it. You know, like nothing’s worked. It’s been decades. I have better things to do. You know, I’ve got a baby, I’ve got a career, but I had a really demanding but satisfying career as a high school assistant principal at the time. And I just thought, I don’t have time for this anymore. And so I did embrace my curves. I’m very much an advocate of body diversity and curving women, but it was what bothered me was less the 30 pounds that I was carrying. And what bothered me more was my eating behaviors. My you relationship with food. And I don’t mean it in a disordered way. The disordered eating that I referred to was really in college, but it was more like I was constantly thinking about food. I was constantly hungry. I was constantly craving, you know, I had a total Trader Joe’s dark chocolate covered peanut butter cup habit every night, you know, and it was that kind of like pull. Like I felt like food had power over me that I didn’t, I didn’t love. I didn’t love that. And so it wasn’t until… I actually went to life coach training for something totally different that I discovered this world of what they call weight loss coaching. And I was totally skeptical. I was like, well, that sounds like a scam because. If it worked, I would have done it by now. I’ve done everything, you know? And, but it turned out that it was actually, it was totally the missing piece.

Speaker #0
So that sounds like so many women’s stories, right? They start like, you know, they have these seasons of life. They start when you’re really young, you know, nine. I know, I mean, I have my own story. My story starts at 11, but it was probably there at nine. You know, it just. but similar, you know, that someone, a doctor says something, right. If someone says something to your, your mother, and then you have to go and die. And then there’s like a snowball effect of dieting that maybe then like lays dormant, then comes back in college, you know, these, you know, and then, then you have your son and it lays dormant, but not really. Right. And then it, right. So I feel like we have all these. seasons where like these, this diet minded behavior, like waxes and wanes until we can finally like find the answer to really sincerely making peace with food and, and our bodies and everything. So your story sounds really familiar to me and to, I’m sure a lot of, of other women. Tell me what happened. You know, you, you found coaching and you were getting certified in life coaching and Skeptics. about weight loss coaching and how did that turn out?

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, it was, um, it was interesting. I, I stumbled upon a tool. I was like listening to a podcast and I stumbled upon this tool, um, that essentially was an approach I hadn’t tried before to eating only when I was hungry and stopping when I wasn’t and, um, or stopping when I was no longer hungry. And, um, I, Thank you. I decided to give that a try. And, you know, it, it sounds like, oh, well, I mean, that’s kind of obvious, but it’s not in our, in our culture. We are told to fear hunger. We are told to eat before you’re even hungry because you don’t want to get hungry later. Yeah. I don’t even get like women are always carrying, you know, snacks in their bags, just in case you get hungry. And it’s like, we’re kind of taught to fear our hunger and to fear ourselves. Like, oh my gosh, if I allow myself to get hungry. I’m going to become this ravenous beast. I’m going to eat the entire kitchen. Or, you know, it’s like, what the heck? You know, hunger is an actual normal signal that our body is supposed to have that lets us know when it’s time to nourish ourselves. But I didn’t trust my own hunger. So I, I implemented this tool and mind you, it was just a mindset tool. And, and I do teach that tool now. It’s actually the first thing I teach my clients because so many of my clients were like me, they didn’t, we don’t even know when we’re hungry. And often we’re never hungry because we’re always eating. Um, you know, we’re eating three to five meals a day and you just, you eat breakfast because it’s breakfast time. And so we don’t really question. And then we don’t even know when our, and then a lot of women will have shame around this, Heather. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this before where they’ll say, I don’t even know what hunger feels like. I don’t think I’m ever hungry. And that shame is totally unnecessary because we are socialized to never feel hungry. Um, and then, and then, stopping when you’re not hungry. That part is, was certainly the hardest part for me. And I think it’s the hardest part for most of us, but that has so much to do with what I learned later, as I started to really get into the study of what was happening biochemically in my body, I started to really understand why I, I didn’t have like a, there was no, you know, Oh, I feel satisfied. I was either ravenous or stuffed. Like there was just two modes for me. And I didn’t know, I couldn’t. feel the nuance between ravenous and stuffed. And so one of the things that I learned is that when I’m putting highly processed foods into my body, and when I say highly processed, I mean, I know you, you appreciate this, right? But when I say highly processed, I mean, anything that’s processed, flour, sugar, all of those. And these are not bad foods, by the way, I’m Italian American pasta for life, right? We, these are not bad foods. It’s just that when I understood how When I would eat pasta, especially growing up, you know, my, my dad was raised in a, on a farm, in a farming community, a bunch of Italian Americans didn’t have a lot of money. And so they ate a lot of pasta, right? Pasta is cheap. And so I grew up eating a lot, just pasta with, without any protein necessarily. We had veggies, but you know, it wasn’t, it was a lot of refined, highly processed foods going into my body. And what I didn’t understand at the time that I understand now is how that impacts my blood sugar and my insulin. and therefore how it impacts my hunger levels and why it was that I could eat an entire half pound of pasta and still not feel stuffed. Right. My husband is six foot seven and I could eat as much as him. I’m like, there’s something wrong here. I’m five foot seven. Like this. Doesn’t make sense. Why can I eat so much? And like I said, it wasn’t about the weight, the additional weight I didn’t love, but I didn’t hate it either. It was about the, why can I not feel satisfied? Why do I need more and more and more to feel satisfied? And when I learned through that, A, there’s a mindset, there’s a narrative that’s important to address when it comes to food, but there’s also an actual biochemical response, physiological response that our bodies have. That for some of us, it’s the whole reason why, and I love to tell people about this. You know, my sister was the quote unquote skinny sister and she didn’t have this overeating tendency. We were raised in the same house, same parents, same foods. She could have a serving of pasta and be done. And I had to have two and three and four servings to find, to feel like I could be done. And I was totally stuffed and had to like unbutton my pants. So the point that I’m sharing here is that it is, it’s your own biochemical makeup. And so it’s not that there was something wrong with me. It’s just my body’s response to highly processed foods physiologically was different than my sister’s. And so therefore, if I shifted the foods that I was choosing to eat on a regular basis, it’s not even that I would lose weight. The 30 pounds of weight loss, I always say it was a byproduct of the actual balancing of my hormone levels when it comes to my hunger and when it comes to my cravings. So I had an overhunger for food and over craving for food, for certain foods like pasta and chocolate. I had that because it was an actual physical response that my body was having to the foods that I was eating. So I always like to share that with people because it’s a two-pronged approach. It is definitely your mindset, but it is also the highly processed foods that a lot of us are eating that’s actually causing us to be hungrier and to crave more. And so therefore, we’re like fighting against ourselves. And that battle is exhausting, especially when you have children and a thriving career. We just don’t have time for that battle.

Speaker #0
Yeah. So you touched on so many good things that I just want to circle back on now. I mean, I think that the first one is the fear of hunger that I think so many women have. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Always making sure you have granola bars and nuts. with you and some dried fruit or whatever. And, or, you know, but then you hear women, they’re skipping breakfast or skipping entire meals. And I say to a lot of my clients, of course, you’re grazing all day long because you’re starving, you’re hungry, but you’re either it kind of, you’re trying, you’re so desperately trying to ignore it. And, but you’re picking and grazing all day long. And then, right, they don’t know. What it feels like just to be mildly hungry and then get satisfied full, you know, not like this, like, and I like to unbutton my pants, you know, just you’re just content, right, with food. And yeah, and that and we need to learn how to tap into that, those signals in our head. When am I, where am I on the, you know, want to call it a food scale, whatever, what, you know, but where am I at? Am I like starving hungry? Am I just mildly hungry? Am I, and then just eat till you are just satisfied.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
And therefore we, then we don’t have to always be just picking two almonds here. I’ll have a granola bar. It’s like, it’s like a, not enough to like fill you up. And so you’re just, it’s, it’s really confusing, I think, to your brain.

Speaker #1
It is confusing. Absolutely. I talk a lot about diet confusion. And I mean, you can understand, right, Heather, why we eat this way. It’s because we’re given so much contradictory information. You know, eat three or five meals a day. Eat small meals. Eat smaller portions. Eat low calorie. Eat low fat. Eat high. You know, I mean, look, there’s so much out there. It’s like, what do we do?

Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, now it’s, you know, intermittent fasting, skip meals to only eat between this and this time. It’s just, I know the confusion is just, can be overwhelming sometimes. So

Speaker #1
I think that’s eating when you’re hungry and something when you’re not, I’ve had clients lose up to 20 pounds just with that one tool.

Speaker #0
And,

Speaker #1
but I always like to say, you know, you have like a biochemical issue. Like I did, if you have, if you’re having trouble distinguishing between what am I hungry and what am I not? Right. That means that we need to recalibrate there. And we can you can. It’s quite simple to learn how to do that. But that really has to be addressed before or else you end up eating only when you’re starving and stopping when you’re stuffed. And that’s beyond what we want. Yeah.

Speaker #0
Yes, definitely. And then you also mentioned just eating. processed foods, which, right, nothing wrong with them. Pasta is delicious. I love pasta. But when you’re eating a lot of those quick and convenient foods, or you’re always eating like a half of a granola bar, like a, it’s, you’re not filling yourself up, I think, with like good, nutritious, filling food, you know, like that fills you in like the right way. So then you’re always eating like stuff that’s messing with your insulin levels and your blood sugar and, and Yeah, I know that that feeling with pasta. I mean, you could eat a box of pasta and not feel and then like, but then like 30 minutes later, like, I’m so stopped. I’m going to die.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
So I think those types of foods, white flour, more processed foods, right, definitely lead to some confusion, I think, because you can’t it’s hard to monitor your fullness with it because it it metabolizes so quickly and it’s exactly. And so, yeah. So making a switch to more filling whole foods, I think is what you’re saying.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And I think that that is for me in the work that I do, that is the first step with clients. So only so that they can actually get in touch with the hunger and satiety, and then we get to work on your brain. And what I mean by that is the actual, the thoughts you’re thinking. the stories that you’re telling, because, you know, when you were just talking about pasta and you can eat it and eat it and eat it. And I really can’t like, you know, I would, I should be in a pasta eating contest, you know, when, but I can, what happens is, you know, I can feel like it’s like a switch where I’m like, oh, I can just keep going and going. And then what happens is, is a lot of times that our brains kick up and then your brain will say, oh, you should stop. You should only have one cup. This is too much. you know, you’re going to gain weight, your pants aren’t going to fit, like you’re ruining your diet, all these things that our brains tell us. And so that’s the narrative piece that comes in. And you know what that narrative piece does is it causes anxiety in you. It causes shame. What do we do when we feel anxious and shameful? We, women like me, we eat to numb the feeling, right? Like, I don’t like that feeling of anxiety. So it actually, you know, I, for. not everybody’s experienced this, but a lot of us have where you’re like, okay, okay, you put it away. Okay. I’m not having any more, you know, and then you end up going back for more anyway. Right. And I remember seeing once I’ll never forget this. I, I admittedly I’m, I’m, I’m a pretty passionate feminist and I have a very anti-feminist habit of watching the real housewives of whatever city. And I’ll never forget watching one episode. I think it was OC. It was many years ago. And watching one of the housewives, no shame here because I’ve been, I’ve been here, but they were all eating out and she had French fries and she was trying to stop herself from eating the French fries. So she grabbed some packets of sweet and low and dumped them all over the French fries. Right. And I remember thinking, oh my God, that is so pathetic, but also thinking, and I totally relate. Like I’ve done that, you know, where I, oh, I’ll tell you another quick story. Heather, When I was an undergrad, I had chocolate cake. And I remember I ate a bunch of it and then I went over to the trash. I opened it. I threw it in the trash, closed the lid. And then you better believe that I went back and ate it out of the trash later. I know. I mean, I hadn’t put a bunch of trash on top. It was still on the top of the trash. But the point is that it’s like that was the same feeling that I had that I related to watching this housewife. It’s like we think we have to make food disgusting in order to stop ourselves. And the truth of the matter is, is like, this is where the narrative comes into play, where when you, when you notice that you’re eating and eating and eating the pasta or eating and eating, eating the fries, the narrative that comes in to tell you that you’re bad or you’re wrong, or you should have more control or this is so bad. I’m so bad. All of that is actually perpetuating the eating. We don’t realize it. So when we can pull back and use a lens of compassion and curiosity. to say, well, of course you want to keep eating French fries. They’re delicious. Like there’s nothing wrong with you. These are French fries, but at the same time, curiosity, what’s going on here? You know? Okay. Well, what’s really happening that I’m opening the trash can and going back for that chocolate cake. There’s something deeper on a deeper level that’s happening for you. And when you can look at that with compassion and curiosity, those are the two C’s that I will not ever stopped screaming about from the rooftops. Then you actually start a different conversation with yourself, one that’s rooted in love and not rooted in shame.

Speaker #0
Yeah, such great examples that I love. The french fries with the sweet and light. I mean, both of those stories are so relatable. You know, I mean, I’d say all of us can say that we have probably to some extent done something like that. At the very least thought, how could I be eating so much? I feel disgusting about myself. I’m so ashamed. And then, right, the anxiety. Oh, my God, I’m going to gain weight. And then you but you still then go back for more.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
It’s like this, just this crazy cycle and the compassion and curiosity, which I, I probably use the word awareness, maybe, you know, like, but I mean, I’m the same. I mean, just to, I think, right. We have to have that with a dialogue with ourselves about what’s going on here or like, am I, yeah, you know what? I’m having a terrible day today. And I just, that triggers my like. full-blown desire to just like eat the whole bag of cookies or whatever it is. And have compassion for yourself because there’s no perfection here. But food is complicated. And if we’ve grown up with like strict food rules, I mean, I think that’s why so many women, I mean, the diet industry is so crazy because I think for a lot of women, it puts them in like, here’s your rules to follow. Thank you. Most people can do that for 30 days. You know, they can follow the rules. But then then life happens, you know, and like we want to be eating. I mean, we want to be eating what we want to be eating and not somebody else’s food plan. And I think it gets confusing. And that’s why I mean, for me, so many of my clients have been on diets, off diets. I mean, their whole entire lives. And I know that you can relate to that just being. Starting from when you were nine years old, being 100 kids. I mean, I can as well. So yeah, really, really great points to consider. I mean, I think that it starts with, the foundation starts with like just tuning into ourselves and having a dialogue with ourselves and just with compassion.

Speaker #1
Yes. You know,

Speaker #0
just like you would talk to a friend, you know, if they were doing the same thing, you’d be-

Speaker #1
Yeah, and you know, I often will say to clients is, you know, if you have a child, imagine that you’re watching your child feel like he or she can’t stop, you know, a little kid, he or she can’t stop eating. What would you say to them? Right. I mean, would you be like, oh, you’re disgusting. What’s wrong with you? No, we’d be like, sweetie, what’s going on? You know, we would want to we would want to get to the root of it. And if you don’t have your own child thinking about you when you were five and picturing yourself. And I can, because this is my whole life, right? Eating, overeating the pasta and like thinking, if I was able to have a conversation with that little five-year-old right now, who was stuffing herself or 10-year-old right now, who was stuffing herself, what would I say to her? What would the thoughts be that I would have about her? And then I want you to turn those thoughts around for yourself, right? Because, and even though some people think, oh, but you know, I would, if I have compassion for myself, I’ll just keep going. And I promise you the opposite is true. It’s when we shame ourselves, shaming always leads to hiding. When you shame, you hide. And when you hide, what do you do? We eat what we hide. We’re going to go into our little corner with our bag of Doritos or whatever it is. And we’re just going to stay there where nobody can see us. But when you have compassion and curiosity, it really allows you to open up. And the other thing I was going to say too, when you were talking, Heather, is trust. You know, as women, we do not trust ourselves. We do not trust ourselves. We do not trust our bodies. I mean, even, and I know I’m, I’m, I’m getting a little bit, you know, but, but I’ll just mention it. Like even to birth babies, we don’t trust ourselves. We feel like we need medical doctors. And I have my son in a hospital. I’m not, I’m not poo-pooing that. I just mean that we are so detached. Like you said, like it’s about that real connection with your body and learning to trust your body that we were made. To give birth, whether you choose to give birth or not, is a totally different story. I just mean, we’re designed for this. And we’re also designed to eat. And we’re also designed to stop eating when we’re not hungry. And human beings are the only animals in the animal kingdom that actually carry additional weight. That is unneeded and unused. We are the only animals that do that. And I think it’s back to your point of… we are so disconnected with ourselves and, and we, we don’t trust ourselves to, um, to know what we’re capable of and when, when we’ve had enough.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Great point. I mean, I think. You mentioned the word baby, you know, like having babies. But I mean, it just made me think that like just going back to when you were a baby, you know, that you did have some trust. Like we were, I think, all apparently born with like trusting our body, right? You ate when you were hungry.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
Pride. And then when you were full, you stopped. You can see you see kids, you know, kind of maybe taking a bite here. And they’re stopping when they’re full. It’s when… the adults come in and start putting their, their beliefs and rules on kids. Like, no, you can’t, you can’t leave the table until you finish your entire plate or have more or have, you know, well, it’s dinner time. And so dinner time is a time you are supposed to eat, you know, like that. And I think that’s, it starts as early as that, right. That we then start not,

Speaker #1
we start to not trust ourselves and just our own intuition.

Speaker #0
right? I mean, we are all intuitive beings. And I think that our intuition starts to go by the wayside. And then we then as adults, I think we really don’t trust ourselves and then comes in diets with promises and rules. And so let’s, let’s trust that for a while, because I can’t trust myself to know when to eat, when to stop, I can’t stop eating, I can’t be gaining weight. And then there’s the fear cycle. I mean, it’s just. Yeah,

Speaker #1
exactly.

Speaker #0
So yeah, learning to really trust that you know how to eat and you know how to stop when you are full.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
And, and food will be there for you. You know, food, food will be there. It’s not going anywhere. You’re not going to die of starvation if you just stop right when you’re ball. So yeah, there’s a lot that goes into, I think, learning about food, right? And then learning about how to lose weight in that sort of more intuitive way.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Right. So I have a question. I mean, so these kinds of behaviors and habits, I think, take time to cultivate, right? This doesn’t just happen overnight if you’re very new to learning how to trust yourself and have compassion for yourself and everything. What if a client came to you and just said, I am super busy because I have plenty of those clients. What’s your answer to busy?

Speaker #1
Yeah. And I get that. And I think the first, my first thought is it doesn’t take a lot of time. In fact, you’re going to eat anyway. I remember once I had a client who said, I’m just, you know, I was just so busy that I just ended up making a sandwich is all I had time to do was make a sandwich. And then as we talked about it further. We talked about, well, what does it take to put together a sandwich? You know, and she was like, well, I, you know, I got out the bread and then the meat and the cheese and then the lettuce and the tomato and the pickle, but you know, she was going and I was like, and I said, what does it take to make a salad? And it was like the same thing. And she was like, oh, it would have taken the exact same amount of time to make that salad that she had planned to eat. Right. But that she didn’t have time for. So she just made the sandwich. So a lot of times we think it’s going to take a lot of time. And, and it doesn’t, it doesn’t take any more time. In fact, I’m… I hate to cook. I’m very vocal about this. Luckily, I was smart and I married somebody who loves to cook. So it works out because I like to eat really well. I just don’t want to be in the kitchen. I don’t, I don’t want to spend my time in the kitchen. And so I have lots and lots of hacks to help clients. I think the more important answer, I mean, that’s like kind of the practical, you know, but the more important answer is I teach a method, a system that I created, It’s called Level Up. There are five steps to the level. And the first step is to lay out your vision. We have to start with vision if you want this to stick. So if you want this to be sustainable, if you want this to quote unquote work forever, which it does and it can, but you have to have a vision that is gonna guide you every step of the way. And the reason for that is because in our world, Thank you. We’re inundated with diet confusion, right? Do this, don’t do that, eat this, don’t eat that. We are inundated with images of food, right? Of, you know, commercials, billboards. We are inundated with even at the office, like, you know, your colleague made these amazing chocolate chip cookies. Like, you know, you have to try what, like.

Speaker #0
Food and sugar is everywhere. Even, you know, the gas station, you can get a full meal while you’re, you know, just like fueling up your car. And so, and, you know, a lot of people will try this with it. Like, oh, I just don’t bring it in the house. If I don’t bring it in the house, I won’t eat it. But guess what? DoorDash can bring you an ice cream sundae in under 60 minutes and you know it at any time of day. So, so you really have to have a vision of yourself to guide you. And what I mean by a vision is… a vision for who you want to be with food, right? Not necessarily what you want your body to look like, but that could be a piece of it. But instead of, you know, when I was a kid, we would cut out pictures of supermodels and tape it to the fridge in hopes that that would like make us not eat, you know, like not go to the fridge for snacks. Like I want to look like Cindy Crawford. So I’m going to not open the fridge, you know, like these weird, you know, it’s like, no, it’s not about looking like Cindy Crawford. It’s about who do I want to be with food? What do I want my relationship to look like with food? So when I sit down to eat, what do my meals look like? What is my energy? Am I relaxed? Am I enjoying? Am I maybe being more efficient because I’m working, but I’m also eating something really healthy that feels good in my body and makes me feel good in my skin. So you have to get that vision ahead of time. And then once you have that vision down, you let the vision be your guide. Now, if you’re a very busy professional woman. Or I say women, cause I only work with women and then I do have a male client, but anyway, if you really picture yourself, okay, so what does it look like for her? She’s very busy. She doesn’t want to prioritize, but I’ll tell you what it looks like for me. I’m very busy. I don’t want to prioritize food. I don’t have time for quote unquote healthy eating. I have tons of, I eat tons of bagged salads, the kind that you can grab off the shelf and I doctor them up a little bit. Right. And I throw some, when I used to work in an office, I would get pre-shredded. Trick chicken. Yeah, it costs a little more, but guess what? My time is money. So get the pre-shredded chicken. I get my bag salad of, you know, Sriracha ranch, whatever cabbage salad that I like, throw it together in a bowl in my office. People used to know, I would even cut tomato and avocado sometimes real fast at my desk and people would walk past my office and think it was hilarious. But then they would also tell me later that they were totally inspired and now they’re making their own salads for lunch. Right? So the point is that it doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but it’s about visioning. What does a busy woman’s life look like if it’s rooted in her value system? And my vision is reflective of my values. So if I see myself as a busy professional who’s eating really healthy on the go, that is what’s going to drive my actions then in the present moment.

Speaker #1
Right. It doesn’t take any more time. I mean, you had the example of the salad versus the sandwich. And… I mean, I’ve given those kind of examples, too, to my clients. I mean, busy is a state of mind. If healthy eating is a priority for you because it makes you feel better about yourself, because of all so many things that it would snowball into, then we can figure it out. I mean, how to work it into our lives. And it doesn’t mean that you have to spend six hours a day. day in the kitchen. I mean,

Speaker #0
it needs to be. Yeah.

Speaker #1
Unless you want to, I mean, unless, right. Unless that’s, that works for you, you know, but I know what you mean. I mean, I cook for a living as well. I mean, and I don’t, I spent, have spent my entire life cooking and I do not want to be in my kitchen six hours a day. The older I get now, I mean, it’s now, It’s just my husband and myself living. At home, my kids are grown and out of the house and my, my priorities and just how I eat or have shifted a little bit. I want it simpler, you know, and that’s okay.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And going back to the seasons of your life, like you were talking about, it does the seasons shift, right? When you have little kids, it looks a little different than when you have grown kids or the tweens. But, you know, the other thing I, I, I just wanted to mention there was that, you know, when people say I don’t have time to eat healthy. You just use the word priority. It’s first of all, recognizing it doesn’t take more time, but second of all, recognizing that it’s then clearly not a priority. And so Zoom has been doing that lately. So then when you, when you picture yourself, let’s say three years from now, this vision of who you want to be with food and what you want your body to feel like and look like and how you want to be treating yourself with food, how is she prioritizing food? Because It’s not happening by, you know, grabbing your, you know, the McDonald’s drive through. Like she didn’t get there by making that decision. Right. She got there differently. And so sometimes like we think that. Oh, if I could just get to this vision of myself, everything would be better. Not really recognizing that you have to think about that vision. She has her own set of priorities. And so what are your priorities now? And are they matching hers? Or are we out of sync? Are we out of alignment? I use that word alignment all the time with my clients. It’s about being in alignment with that vision of yourself, of who it is that you would most love to be in this world. And then really working from that. place.

Speaker #1
Yeah. I just love having a vision or your why I sometimes call it, or, you know, just something that like is your value system, right. That like doesn’t waver. Right. I mean, that’s like rock solid, you’re like foundation and to always keep that in mind is crucial. I mean, you have to have that to keep. on your path, you know, of better eating and feeling good and whatever it may mean, if it’s losing 30 pounds or if it’s just getting more energy or whatever, whatever the goal is.

Speaker #0
Absolutely.

Speaker #1
Why do you feel like, I mean, even though with a vision or your why, or like having all this, you know, self-compassion, everything, why do you think women self-sabotage? Yeah. We could be going along like, you know, things are going great. And then something like has to trip us up. Is there, what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker #0
So I have two kind of responses, but I actually think that they are both totally relevant. The first one is I teach clients this psychological concept called motivational triad. which basically is a concept in psychology that says that human beings are motivated by three things and three things only. The first is to seek pleasure. We are hard wired for this. This is a survival mechanism, right? Like this is why women’s breast milk is sweet. It is to keep the baby consuming food so that it will grow. This is why mother nature coupled reproduction with pleasure, right? Like we are designed to want to feel good. So we can’t get around that hardwired. The second thing that we’re motivated by is to avoid discomfort or pain. And again, that’s a survival mechanism, obviously, you know, it’s so that we can not walk through the fire when back when we lived in caves, but instead walk around it because we want to avoid pain and discomfort. And then the third thing that we’re motivated by, again, this is all hardwired, is we’re motivated by energy conservation. So anything that our brain thinks will help us to conserve energy, also a survival mechanism. So we can have the energy that we need. If a saber-toothed tiger jumps out, again, back when we lived in caves, we had the energy to fight or to run. And so when you think about this motivational triad, it makes so much sense that in our modern world, it totally screws us over because A, saber-toothed tigers are extinct. So luckily we’re not running from a whole bunch of wild animals anymore. Most of us, if you’re listening to this podcast, probably not. But then B is that. in our modern world, we have made pleasure so readily available at our fingertips at any moment in time. Like I mentioned earlier, DoorDash or the fact that we have shelf stable foods. But the idea is that we have pleasure and literally our phones are a source of dopamine. We have pleasure readily available at our fingertips all the time. So if you’re hard wired to seek pleasure and you’re hardwired to avoid pain and discomfort, well, in our modern world. We’re not running from the saber-toothed tiger. But we register pain and discomfort as stress, exhaustion, boredom, overwhelm, even excitement can feel uncomfortable in your body. Right. And so what happens is, is we’re hardwired into your brain. Let’s say you feel some stress, right? You’ve had a long day at work. You’ve got a screaming kid. You’ve got, you know, your neighbor is really driving you crazy with the music, whatever it is, there’s something. And we’ll use stress just as the example here, your brain is registering that as discomfort. And so then your brain is going to subconsciously even tell you to go find some pleasure because we got to get away from this discomfort. And by the way, do it with the least amount of effort possible because we want to conserve energy for survival. So that’s what makes us walk to the pantry and grab the bag of M&Ms. It is pleasure. It is avoiding the discomfort of the stress and it is quick and easy. This is also why back when I used to really struggle with overeating and I would swear to myself, I’d be like, okay. Today, when I really want to overeat, I’m going to go do some yoga instead, or I’m going to go for a walk instead. I know, I know all these healthy habits. But guess why I never did it. Why? Because those take effort. It takes a lot of effort. My brain wants to conserve energy. It wants to get towards the pleasure, away from the pain, conserve the energy. So this is where I always go back to compassion. You’re hardwired to want to eat the M&Ms. We don’t need to beat ourselves up for it. We’re hardwired to numb out stress or exhaustion or disappointment. We’re hardwired to do this. So that’s the first reason we self-sabotage. The second reason, though, that we often self-sabotage is Thank you. And it’s a bit more, I would say, advanced in that it takes quite a bit of self-awareness and metacognition. But it’s the idea of, Gay Hendricks talks about this idea in his book, The Big Leap. It’s this idea of upper limiting. So we all have this identity that we have, that has been shaped over the years of our lives. It’s been shaped by other people and it’s been shaped by ourselves. What’s interesting about the definition of identity is your identity is you who you think you are and who you think other people think you are. So that is what makes our identity. It’s who you think you are and who you think other people think that you are. So if I think that you think that I’m, you know, successful, that’s going to, that’s going to have an impact on my identity. But if I think that I’m a fraud, that’s also going to have an impact on my identity, right? So our, our causes imposter syndrome, but, but that’s how our identity is shaped. And Thank you. Gay Hendricks talks about with that for limiting that we all have this idea of the amount of love that we really are worthy of, or the amount of success, the amount of money, the amount of sexiness, the amount of beauty. We have this idea of like, well, this is my zone, you know, and like Cindy Crawford, she’s got this zone up here, but I’m down here or, you know, um, Bill Gates with money or Cheryl, Cheryl, um, Sanford, I remember that. but these people who make lots and lots and lots of money, right? Well, that’s their world, but I, my identity doesn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know how to. And so what, what we do, according to Gay Hendricks, he’s a psychologist, by the way, out of Stanford, for those of you who aren’t familiar. But what he does is what he talks about is this idea of upper limiting. So what we do is when we start to feel like we’re having a little too much success, a little too much joy, a little too much happiness, a little too much of whatever it is, we will self-sabotage subconsciously. And a lot of times this has to do with, well, it’s 100% our identity as I just defined it, but it has to do with like where you came from, who you were told you were growing up, who other people tell you that you are. But then especially, at least for me, it has to do with, you know, how I identify where my family fits in society and fits in terms of this, you know, these worlds and these communities. So I think those are the two reasons that we. And then there’s more than that. But I think that those are the two big ones, you know, that we self-sabotage for those two reasons. And it’s also why that mindset work, that narrative work is so important because that’s how we can actually overcome the subconscious upper limiting that we might be doing and also overcome that self-sabotage that we’re hardwired for in our modern world.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, great explanation. Thank you for that. But I agree with you. I I think that we are hardwired for some self-sabotage. And I think that. when you are at the end of a long, tiring day and your brain is just like, get me the M&Ms out of the cabinet. It’s just within us to do that. I mean, it’s not your fault. You’re not weak. You’re not just don’t have enough willpower or discipline. I mean, it’s just right. We are hard wired. And I think what the other thing you said about just having. maybe too much success or, you know, when, when you don’t feel I’m good enough or it’s almost like it just feels so wildly uncomfortable. I think sometimes for people, right. They’re like on a good trajectory trajectory and, and they’re losing weight and feeling good. And it’s right. It’s almost like too much to handle sometimes. Like, it’s like, you’re, you’re just, you know, Maybe you’ve gotten messages from… growing up, whatever that, you know, it’s just, you’re never going to be good enough for. So, I mean, it’s right. It’s a lot to, a lot to unpack, you know, with self-sabotage, but I think those are two really good explanations of why we do it. And then to keep consistent with our compassion and our dialogues that we have with ourselves.

Speaker #0
Yes, absolutely. It’s key.

Speaker #1
Yeah. So that always has to be first and foremost, and that’s a habit. i think that we have to

Speaker #0
It’s a habit and it’s a choice. And sometimes people, people will say, well, that sounds like a lot of work, but it’s a, it’s a different kind of work. It’s a work that has such a deep payoff, first of all. And second of all, it’s going to be a lot of work. Your lack of awareness is a lot of work too. You know what I mean? Because you’re dealing with all of these results that you’re creating in your life that you don’t love. And then you’re dealing with all of your mind drama around that. So it’s like, I always say, and I got this from my mentor, but we’re always creating, we always are working in some kind of vision. It’s just a matter of, are you working in a default vision or are you working on an intentional vision? You know? And it’s like, but either way, you’re always creating. So it’s just a matter of deciding, do I want to create my life intentionally? This is why my podcast is called the life you crave, or, and I always talk about creating the life you crave because it’s an intentional decision to say, look, if I’m creating my life anyway, why not create intentionally instead of out of the default that was passed down to me over generations and generations, you know?

Speaker #1
Great point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it does. This work does take a lot of work. It’s not busy work where you’re chopping up vegetables in the kitchen or like that kind of, you know, physical time. But it does take a lot of mental work. And I just know that a lot of the clients that I see, I mean, they come in to me initially and they just just tell me what to eat. Just tell me what to eat. I don’t want to think about it. And then we go back and start from the beginning, you know, because you do need this kind of mental and emotional work before you can get to the other like nitty gritty.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And if you want it to be in my, in my level up system that I, that I teach the one, two, the fourth step, I had to count the fourth step, the E the second E in level is embodiment. And if you want to get to embodiment, embodiment is basically when this just becomes who you are. So you no longer have to think about it in order to get there though. You have to actually put, you have to invest your mental energy and start to shift your physical energy. Right. And so, and you do get to embodiment. I don’t have to think very much about what I’m eating anymore. I think about it as much as probably, you know, you would think a quote, normal person thinks about it as opposed to somebody who used to be food obsessed, but If you want to get to that place where you don’t have to think about it, there’s actually a journey that you need to go on in order to arrive at that place.

Speaker #1
Yes. I like to think of it like that too, as a journey.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And that takes work.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
But it’s worth it, right? Well, worth it in the end. Well, Leah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. You’ve just given a wealth of information. And how can people get in touch with you? If they want to hear more about your program or just reach out for more information.

Speaker #0
Yeah. To my website, liapanelli.com. And my name is L-I-A-P-I-N-E-L-L-I.com. Great. Well, thanks.

Speaker #1
And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get. the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.